privilege
I started this book in May, and it's now almost October: this book took me five months to finish. I liked this book because a) all the social maneuvering (or faux pas) Khan wrote about, I did subconsciously. b) The last book that resonated with me this much was Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep. But Prep was a novel, and Privilege is a full-on ethnography.
When I first began at my Upper East Side private school in seventh grade, I was thrown into a world of which I had no prior knowledge: a world of privileged, ambitious, and incredibly kind students (a winning combination which made them impossible for anyone to resent). Harvard, a birthright? But, for a fourth-generation legacy, Harvard is a birthright, not a herculean accomplishment. My Asian immigrant parents (much like Shamus Khan's, I think) misconstrued my feelings of confusing and awe as ingratitude and shame; a "spoiled brat" complaining about trivial matters. However, I never felt inferior to my peers because their parents were wealthier or more successful (and they certainly were): I later realized that my feelings of inferiority came from my own inability to acquire and use social and cultural capital.
As a twelve or thirteen-year-old, I had no idea what either of those things was, but I did feel that my teenage peers felt more comfortable navigating social situations than most adults. When my classmates greeted adults, they did so with agility and grace, presenting themselves with polished elevator pitches, making eye contact, and maintaining the momentum of the conversation if it began to dwindle down. They treated everyone with the same amount of respect and were incredibly attuned to each person's feelings. At the same time, they felt comfortable dining at restaurants at Le Bernardin or St. Georges, whereas I would stress incessantly over the correct placement of each utensil. The first time my class took a trip to see Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at the Metropolitan Opera, I was stunned by the set, the music, even the glowing subtitles on a small LCD screen attached to the seat in front of me. I remember that in a follow-up assignment for my music class, I had written that I was "teetering on the edge of my seat" during the entire performance: I was more or less met with a benign skepticism because for most of the other students, it was nothing new.
By the time I got to boarding school in ninth grade, I had began to realize that there was a set of unspoken rules at elite educational institutions. Dan-el Padilla Peralta wrote that at Collegiate, "You were really popular if you were smart—a very specific kind of fast-talking, highly literate, ever so slightly sarcastic smart." In boarding school, I retaught myself how to write, how to talk, even how to walk. I learned to write the kinds of essays my teachers liked - connecting broad ideas across different disciplines in the humanities. I learned to converse with my dining hall staff and CEOs of investment companies with trillions in assets under management with the same degree of comfort. I learned that a frantic walk like Mary's was likely to be frowned upon, and people really do notice. By my junior year, I realized that school was by far the least important component of "boarding school;" no one really cares about academic achievement in the way that the students at public school or even my previous private day school had; as Khan writes, boarding school was about "building and maintaining relationships, involving oneself in groups, and developing a distinctive personal character," not sitting at a desk to study. In other words: boarding school students build the soft skills necessary for long-term management, rather technical skills workers must relearn every year to keep up with young talent. At boarding school, I learned to develop and cultivate privilege: a sense of knowing that I could navigate the world, and with ease.
I think this book is important for several reasons. To address inequality, we must understand how privilege works (I also highly recommend The Aristocracy that Let Me In). We need to start having more open, academic dialogues about class as a social category. We must also acknowledge the advantages that an elite education brings, whether a more interesting personal “story," a sense of confidence about navigating one’s surrounding world, or the seamless transfer of intergenerational wealth. With a deeper understanding of privilege, we can then revise the measures we use to evaluate college applicants, benchmark student success, or improve public education.
